Jewell has served as the outdoor retailer's CEO since 2005. She started her career as a petroleum engineer working in the oil fields of Oklahoma and Colorado for Mobil Oil Corp. She then moved to the banking industry, before joining the REI board in 1996 and becoming chief operations officer four years later.

REI is a good place to buy gee-whiz hiking and camping equipment, but it is run and frequented by touchy-feely, hippy types that believe that the outdoors is to be hiked (or paddled) through and looked at but not touched. It's all very pricey and catering to the upper middle class (they're known around here as Really Expensive Items).

I think of them as the opposite of Cabela's and Bass Pro, which are geared more towards the average shopper and acknowledge the existence of hunting and fishing and that not everybody can be a "low impact camper".

I shop at both REI and Bass Pro, but my sympathies are entirely with the Bass Pro Nation.

She started her career as a petroleum engineer working in the oil fields of Oklahoma and Colorado for Mobil Oil Corp. She then moved to the banking industry, before joining the REI board in 1996 and becoming chief operations officer four years later.

Translation: She must have really sucked as a Petroleum Engineer. Which is of course why she'll be put in charge of regulating drilling and fracking.

She was born in England. Her father brought the family to the US when she was 3 to take a teaching fellowship at the University of Washington Medical School. It looks like her post-secondary education was all at UW.

She would not be the first female Secretary of the Interior--GWB picked Gale Norton.

Interesting choice. Comments on her looks seem way out of line. She is married with children.
Her political connections and views are another issue. She apparently served on some boards with George Mitchell, Madeline Albrecht and Colin Powell. What makes me nervous is her views on how to educate more qualified folks:
“One possibility is to charge higher tuition in fields like engineering where you have high potential for earnings and it costs more to educate you.”
This makes little economic sense and is likely to increase the numbers of folks who can do nothing but look for the government to provide them jobs.

Interesting choice. Comments on her looks seem way out of line. She is married with children.
Her political connections and views are another issue. She apparently served on some boards with George Mitchell, Madeline Albrecht and Colin Powell. What makes me nervous is her views on how to educate more qualified folks:
“One possibility is to charge higher tuition in fields like engineering where you have high potential for earnings and it costs more to educate you.”
This makes little economic sense and is likely to increase the numbers of folks who can do nothing but look for the government to provide them jobs.

“In engineering school, I worked for General Electric for a total of 18 months over a period of three years. It was a good time for engineers. I had 15 offers for jobs coming out of school and ended up working for Mobil. I came back in 1981 to work for Rainier Bank as an oil and gas expert because I loved Seattle. Oil and gas isnt found in the most pleasant places in the world and, being a woman, there were things I had to put up with that would be considered illegal now, and it just became tiresome. I also wanted to raise my children around grandparents.”

Anyone who loves Seattle is NOT someone I want running public lands in the western USA! If anything, Seattle is left of San Francisco.

“The Greenway as it is today was first envisioned in 1990, when a group of citizens hiked from the Cascade Crest alongside Interstate 90, through the forest all the way. The Seattle region was on the verge of a significant economic boom, and unchecked sprawl threatened much of the region.”

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